
JlDliNACOlMT] 



zzzz 
»6m 




James Russell Lowel'^ 






■' 

■ 




Qass_ 
Book__ 



cJotl)/ binding make them peculiarly convenient tor 
carrying on short journeys ; and the excellence of 



! their contents makes 


them desirable always and 


everywhere. The 


series includes 


STORIES, ESSAYS, 


SKETCHES, AND POEMS 


SELECTED 


FROM THE WRITINGS OF | 


Emerson, 




Tennyson, ' 


Longfellow, 




Lowell, 1 


Whittier, 




Holmes, \ 


Hawthorne, 




Browning, 


Carlyle, 




Macau I ay, 


Aldrich, 




Milton, ■ 


Hood, 




Campbell, 


Gray, 




Owen Meredith, j 


Aytoun, 




Pope, \ 




Thomson, 


AND OTHERS 

The vohimes are beai 


OF EQUAL FAME. 


atifully printed, many of them 


illustrated, and bound 


in flexible cloth covers, at a 


uniform price of 






FIFTY dENTS EACH. j 


JAMES 


R. 


OSGOOD & CO., 

Publishers, Boston. 



i: I 



,c 



^^ 



GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE 



S, and "ih . 



A Good ^ord f6r Winfer. 



JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL, 




t 



4i 

BOSTON: '•. ■ 

JAMES R. OSGOOD AND COMPANY, 

Laie Titknor and Fields, and Fields, Oogood, &• Co. 



isr{ 



Copyright, i^i, by 
JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 



mss^^. i^ii^4sN' 



University Press : Welch, Bigelow, & Co., 
Cambridge. 



CONTENTS. 

Page 
MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE .... 5 

A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER .... 45 



MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 



NE of the most delightful hooks in 
my father's library was White's Nat- 
ural History of Selborne. For me 
it has rather gained in charm with years. I 
used to read it without knowing the secret 
of the pleasure I found in it, but as I grow 
older I begin to detect some of the simple 
expedients of this natural magic. Open the 
book where you will, it takes you out of 
doors. In our broiling July weather one 
can walk out with this genially garrulous 
Fellow of Oriel and find refreshment instead 
of fatigue. You have no trouble in keeping 
abreast of him as he ambles along on his 
hobby-horse, now pointing to a pretty view, 
now stopping to watch the motions of a bird 



6 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 

or an insect, or to bag a specimen for the 
Honorable Daines Barrington or Mr. Pen- 
nant. In simplicity of taste and natural 
refinement he reminds one of Walton ; in 
tenderness toward what he would have called 
the brute creation, of Cowper. I do not 
know whether his descriptions of scenery are 
good or not, but they have made me familiar 
with his neighborhood. Since I first read 
him, I have walked over some of his favor- 
ite haunts, but I still see them through his 
eyes rather than by any recollection of actual 
and personal vision. The book has also the 
delightfulness of absolute leisure. Mr. White 
seems never to have had any harder work to 
do than to study the habits of his feathered 
fellow-townsfolk, or to watch the ripening 
of his peaches on the wall. His volumes 
are the journal of Adam in Paradise, 

" Annihilating all that 's made 
To a green thought in a green shade." 

It is positive rest only to look into that gar- 
den of his. It is vastly better than to 

'' See great Diocletian walk 
In the Salonian garden's noble shade," 



MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. / 

for thither ambassadors intrude to bring with 
them the noises of Rome, while here the 
world has no entrance. No rumor of the 
revolt of the American Colonies seems to 
have reached him. " The natural term of 
an hog's life " has more interest for him than 
that of an empire. Burgoyne may surrender 
and welcome ; of what consequence is that 
compared with the fact that we can explain 
the odd tumbling of rooks in the air by their 
turning over " to scratch themselves with one 
claw " 1 All the couriers in Europe spurring 
rowel-deep make no stir in Mr. White's lit- 
tle Chartreuse ; but the arrival of the house- 
martin a day earlier or later than last year 
is a piece of news worth sending express to 
all his correspondents. 

Another secret charm of this book is its 
inadvertent humor, so much the more deli- 
cious because unsuspected by the author. 
How pleasant is his innocent vanity in add- 
ing to the list of the British, and still more 
of the Selbornian,/awna / I believe he would 
gladly have consented to be eaten by a tiger 
or a crocodile, if by that means the occasional 



8 MY GAUDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 

presence within the parish limits of either 
of these anthropophagous brutes could have 
been established. He brags of no fine so- 
ciety, but is plainly a little elated by " hav- 
ing considerable acquaintance with a tame 
brown owl.'' Most of us have known our 
share of owls, but few can boast of intimacy 
with a feathered one. The great events of 
Mr. White's life, too, have that dispropor- 
tionate importance which is always humor- 
ous. To think of his hands having actually 
been thought worthy (as neither Willough- 
b/s nor Ray's were) to hold a stilted plover, 
the Charadrius Mmantopus, with no back toe, 
and therefore " liable, in speculation, to per- 
petual vacillations " ! I wonder, by the way, 
if metaphysicians have no hind toes. In 
1770 he makes the acquaintance in Sussex 
of " an old family tortoise," which had then 
been domesticated for thirty years. It is 
clear that he fell in love with it at first 
sight. We have no means of tracing the 
growth of his passion ; but in 1780 we find 
him eloping with its object in a post-chaise. 
" The rattle and hurry of the journey so per- 



MY GAEDEN ACQUxilNTANCE. 9 

fectly roused it that, when I turned it out 
in a border, it walked twice down to the 
bottom of my garden." It reads like a Court 
Journal : " Yesterday morning H. R. H, the 
Princess Alice took an airing of half an hour 
on the terrace of Windsor Castle." This tor- 
toise might have been a member of the Royal 
Society, if he could have condescended to so 
ignoble an ambition. It had but just been 
discovered that a surface inclined at a cer- 
tain angle with the plane of the horizon 
took more of the sun's rays. The tortoise 
had always known this (though he unosten- 
tatiously made no parade of it), and used 
accordingly to tilt himself up against the 
garden-wall in the autumn. He seems to 
have been more of a philosopher than even 
Mr. White himself, caring for nothing but 
to get under a cabbage-leaf when it rained, 
or the sun was too hot, and to bury himself 
alive before frost, — a four-footed Diogenes, 
who carried his tub on his back. 

There are moods in which this kind of 
history is infinitely refreshing. These crea- 
tures whom we affect to look down upon as 



10 MY GAUDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 

the drudges of instinct are members of a 
eommonwealth whose constitution rests on 
immovable bases. Never any need of re- 
construction there ! They never dream of 
settling it by vote that eight hours are equal 
to ten, or that one creature is as clever as 
another and no more. They do not use their 
poor wits in regulating God's clocks, nor 
think they cannot go astray so long as they 
carry their guide-board about with them, — 
a delusion we often practise upon ourselves 
with our high and mighty reason, that ad- 
mirable finger-post which points every way 
and always right. It is good for us now 
and then to converse with a world like Mr. 
White's, where Man is the least important 
of animals. But one who, like me, has al- 
ways lived in the country and always on the 
same spot, is drawn to his book by other 
occult sympathies. Do we not share his 
indignation at that stupid Martin who had 
graduated his thermometer no lower than 4° 
above zero of Fahrenheit, so that in the cold- 
est weather ever known the mercury basely 
absconded into the bulb, and left us to see 



MY GAUDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 11 

the victory slip through our fingers just as 
they were closing upon it ? No man. I sus- 
pect, ever lived long in the country without 
being bitten by these meteorological ambi- 
tions. He likes to be hotter and colder, to 
have been more deeply snowed up, to have 
more trees and larger blown down than his 
neighbors. With us descendants of the Pu- 
ritans especially, these weather-competitions 
supply the abnegated excitement of the race- 
course. Men learn to value thermometers 
of the true imaginative temperament, capa- 
ble of prodigious elations and correspond- 
ing dejections. The other day (5th July) I 
marked 98° in the shade, my high-water 
mark, higher by one degree than I had ever 
seen it before. I happened to meet a neigh- 
bor ; as we mopped our brows at each other, 
he told me that he had just cleared 100°, 
and 1 went home a beaten man. I had not 
felt the heat before, save as a beautiful exag- 
geration of sunshine ; but now it oppressed 
me with the prosaic vulgarity of an oven. 
What had been poetic intensity became all 
at once rhetorical hyperbole. I might sus- 



12 MY GAUDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 

pect Ms thermometer (as indeed I did, for 
we Harvard men are apt to think ill of any 
graduation but our own) ; but it was a poor 
consolation. The fact remained that his her- 
ald Mercury, standing a-tiptoe, could look 
down on mine. I seem to glimpse some- 
thing of this familiar weakness in Mr. White. 
He, too, has shared in these mercurial tri- 
umphs and defeats. Nor do I doubt that 
he had a true country-gentleman's interest 
in the weathercock ; that his first question 
on coming down of a morning was, like 
Barabbas's, 

*' Into what quarter peers my halcyon's bill ? " 

It is an innocent and healthful employ- 
ment of the mind, distracting one from too 
continual study of himself, and leading him 
to dwell rather upon the indigestions of the 
elements than his own. "Did the wind 
back round, or go about with the sun 1 " is 
a rational question that bears not remotely 
on the making of hay and the prosperity of 
crops. I have little doubt that the regulated 
observation of the vane in many different 



MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 13 

places, and the interchange of results by tel- 
egraph, would put the weather, as it were, 
in our power, by betraying its ambushes be- 
fore it is ready to give the assault. At first 
sight, nothing seems more droUy trivial than 
the lives of those whose single achievement 
is to record the wind and the temperature 
three times a day. Yet such men are doubt- 
less sent into the world for this special end, 
and perhaps there is no kind of accurate ob- 
servation, whatever its object, that has not 
its final use and value for some one or other. 
It is even to be hoped that the speculations 
of our newspaper editors and their myriad 
correspondents upon the signs of the political 
atmosphere may also fill their appointed place 
in a well-regulated universe, if it be only 
that of supplying so many more jack-o'-lan- 
terns to the future historian. Nay, the ob- 
servations on finance of an M. C. whose sole 
knowledge of the subject has been derived 
from a lifelong success in getting a living 
out of the public without paying any equiv- 
alent therefor, will perhaps be of interest 
hereafter to some explorer of our cloaca 
maxima, whenever it is cleansed. 



14 MY GAEDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 

For many years I have been in the habit 
of noting down some of the leading events 
of my embowered solitude, such as the com- 
ing of certain birds and the like, — a kind 
of memoires pour servir, after the fashion of 
White, rather than properly digested natural 
history. I thought it not impossible that a 
few simple stories of my winged acquaint- 
ances might be found entertaining by per- 
sons of kindred taste. 

There is a common notion that animals 
are better meteorologists than men, and I 
have little doubt that in immediate weather- 
wisdom they have the advantage of our so- 
phisticated senses (though I suspect a sailor 
or shepherd would be their match), but I 
have seen nothing that leads me to believe 
their minds capable of erecting the horoscope 
of a whole season, and letting us know be- 
forehand whether the winter will be severe 
or the summer rainless. I more than sus- 
pect that the clerk of the weather himself 
does not always know very long in advance 
whether he is to draw an order for hot or 
cold, dry or moist, and the musquash is 



MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 15 

scarce likely to be wiser. I have noted but 
two days' difference in the coming of the 
song-sparrow between a very early and a 
very backward spring. This very year I 
saw the linnets at work thatching, just be- 
fore a snow-storm which covered the ground 
several inches deep for a number of days. 
They struck work and left us for a while, 
no doubt in search of food. Birds frequently 
perish from sudden changes in our whimsi- 
cal spring weather of which they had no 
foreboding. More than thirty years ago, a 
cherry-tree, then in full bloom, near my 
window, was covered with humming-birds 
benumbed by a fall of mingled rain and 
snow, which probably killed many of them. 
It should seem that their coming was dated 
by the height of the sun, which betrays them 
into unthrifty matrimony ; 

"So nature pricketh hem in their corages" ; 

but their going is another matter. The 
chimney-swallows leave us early, for exam- 
ple, apparently so soon as their latest fledg- 
lings are firm enough of wing to attempt the 



16 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 

long rowing-match that is before them. On 
the other hand, the wild-geese probably do 
not leave the North till they are frozen out, 
for I have heard their bugles sounding south- 
ward so late as the middle of December. 
What may be called local migrations are 
doubtless dictated by the chances of food, 
I have once been visited by large flights 
of cross-bills ; and whenever the snow lies 
long and deep on the ground, a flock of 
cedar-birds comes in midwinter to eat the 
berries on my hawthorns. I have never 
been quite able to fathom the local, or rather 
geographical partialities of birds. Never be- 
fore this summer (1870) have the king-birds, 
handsomest of fly-catchers, built in my or- 
chard ; though I always know where to find 
them within half a mile. The rose-breasted 
grosbeak has been a familiar bird in Brook- 
line (three miles away), yet I never saw one 
here till last July, when I found a female 
busy among my raspberries and surprisingly 
bold. I hope she was prospecting with a view 
to settlement in our garden. She seemed, 
on the whole, to think well of my fruit, and 



MY GARDEX ACQUAINTANCE. 17 

I would gladly plant another bed if it would 
help to win over so delightful a neighbor. 

The return of the robin is commonly an- 
nounced by the newspapers, like that of 
eminent or notorious people to a watering- 
place, as the first authentic notification of 
spring. And such his appearance in the 
orchard and garden undoubtedly is. But, 
in spite of his name of migratory thrush, he 
stays with us all winter, and I have seen 
him when the thermometer marked 15° be- 
low zero of Fahrenheit, armed impregnably 
within, like Emerson's Titmouse, and as 
cheerful as he. The robin has a bad repu- 
tation among people who do not value them- 
selves less for being fond of cherries. There 
is, I admit, a spice of A^ilgarity in him, and 
his song is rather of the Bloomfield sort, too 
largely ballasted with prose. His ethics are 
of the Poor Kichard school, and the main 
chance which calls forth all his energy is 
altogether of the belly. He never has those 
fine intervals of lunacy into which his cous- 
ins, the catbird and the mavis, are apt to 
fall. But for a' that and twice as muckle 's 



18 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 

a' that, I would not exchange him for all the 
cherries that ever came out of Asia Minor. 
With whatever faults, he has not wholly for- 
feited that superiority which belongs to the 
children of nature. He has a finer taste in 
fruit than could be distilled from many 
successive committees of the Horticultural 
Society, and he eats with a relishing gulp 
not inferior to Dr. Johnson's. He feels and 
freely exercises his right of eminent domain. 
His is the earliest mess of green peas ; his 
all the mulberries I had fancied mine. But 
if he get also the lion's share of the rasp- 
berries, he is a great planter, and sows those 
wild ones in the woods, that solace the pe- 
destrian and give a momentary calm even 
to the jaded victims of the White Hills. 
He keeps a strict eye over one's fruit, and 
knows to a shade of purple when your grapes 
have cooked long enough in the sun. Dur- 
ing the severe drought a few years ago, the 
robins wholly vanished from my garden. I 
neither saw nor heard one for three weeks. 
Meanwhile a small foreign grape-vine, rather 
shy of bearing, seemed to find the dusty air 



MY GARDEN ACQUAINTAXCE. 19 

congenial, and, dreaming perhaps of its sweet 
Argos across the sea, decked itself with a 
score or so of fair bunches. I watched them 
from day to day till they should have se- 
creted sugar enough from the sunbeams, and 
at last made up my mind that I would cele- 
brate my vintage the next morning. But 
the robins too had somehow kept note of 
them. They must have sent out spies, as 
did the Jews into the promised land, before 
I was stirring. When I went w^ith my bas- 
ket, at least a dozen of these winged vin- 
tagers bustled out from among the leaves, 
and alighting on the nearest trees inter- 
changed some shrill remarks about me of a 
derogatory nature. They had fairly sacked 
the vine. Not Wellington's veterans made 
cleaner w^ork of a Spanish town ; not Fed- 
erals or Confederates were ever more impar- 
tial in the confiscation of neutral chickens. 
I was keeping my grapes a secret to surprise 
the fair Fidele with, but the robins made 
them a profounder secret to her than I had 
meant. The tattered remnant of a single 
bunch was all niy harvest-home. How pal- 



20 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 

try it looked at the bottom of my basket, — 
as if a humming-bird had laid her egg in an 
eagle's nest ! I could not help laughing ; 
and the robins seemed to join heartily in the 
merriment. There was a native grape-vine 
close by, blue with its less refined abun- 
dance, but my cunning thieves preferred the 
foreign flavor. Could I tax them with want 
of taste ] 

The robins are not good solo singers, but 
their chorus, as, like primitive fire-worship- 
pers, they hail the return of light and warmth 
to the world, is unrivalled*, There are a 
hundred singing like one. They are noisy 
enough then, and sing, as poets should, with 
no afterthought. But when they come after 
cherries to the tree near my window, they 
muffle their voices, and their faint pip, pip, 
pop ! sounds far away at the bottom of the 
garden, where they know I shall not suspect 
them of robbing the great black-walnut of 
its bitter-rinded store.* They ar§ feathered 

* The screech-owl, whose cry, despite his ill 
name, is one of the sweetest soitnds in nature, 
softens his voice in the same way with the most 
beguilinsr mockerv of distance. 



MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 21 

Pecksniffs, to be sure, but then how brightly 
their breasts, that look rather shabby in the 
sunlight, shine in a rainy day against the 
dark green of the fringe-tree ! After they 
have pinched and shaken all the life out 
of an earthworm, as Italian cooks pound all 
the spirit out of a steak, and then gulped 
him, they stand up in honest self-confidence, 
expand their red waistcoats with the virtu- 
ous air of a lobby member, and outface you 
with an eye that calmly challenges inquiry. 
" Do / look like a bird that knows the flavor 
of raw vermin ? I throw myself upon a jury 
of my peers. Ask any robin if he ever ate 
anything less ascetic than the frugal berry 
of the juniper, and he will answer that his 
vow forbids him." Can such an open bosom 
cover such depravity ? Alas, yes ! I have 
no doubt his breast was redder at that very 
moment with the blood of my raspberries. 
On the whole, he is a doubtful friend in the 
garden. He makes his dessert of all kinds 
of berries, and is not averse from early pears. 
But when we remember how omnivorous he 
is, eating his own weight in an incredibly 



22 MY GAEDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 

short time, and that Nature seems exhaust- 
less in her invention of new insects hostile 
to vegetation, perhaps we may reckon that he 
does more good than harm. For my own 
part, I would rather have his cheerfulness 
and kind neighborhood than many berries. 

For his cousin, the catbird, I have a still 
warmer regard. Always a good singer, he 
sometimes nearly equals the brown thrush, 
and has the merit of keeping up his music 
later in the evening than any bird of my 
familiar acquaintance. Ever since I can 
remember, a pair of them have built in a 
gigantic syringa, near our front door, and I 
have known the male to sing almost un- 
interruptedly during the evenings of early 
summer till twilight duskened into dark. 
They differ greatly in vocal talent, but all 
have a delightful way of crooning over, and, 
as it were, rehearsing their song in an un- 
dertone, which makes their nearness always 
unobtrusive. Though there is the most trust- 
worthy witness to the imitative propensity 
of this bird, I have only once, during an in- 
timacy of more than forty years, heard him 



MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 23 

indulge it. In that case, the imitation was 
by no means so close as to deceive, but a 
free reproduction of the notes of some other 
birds, especially of the oriole, as a kind of 
variation in his own song. The catbird is as 
shy as the robin is vulgarly familiar. Only 
when his nest or his fledglings are approached 
does he become noisy and almost aggressive. 
I have kno\vn him to station his young in 
a thick cornel-bush on the edge of the rasp- 
berry-bed, after the fruit began to ripen, and 
feed them there for a week or more. In such 
cases he shows none of that conscious guilt 
which makes the robin contemptible. On 
the contrary, he will maintain his post in 
the thicket, and sharply scold the intruder 
who ventures to steal his berries. After all, 
his claim is only for tithes, while the robin' 
will bag your entire crop if he get a chance. 
Dr. Watts's statement that " birds in their 
little nests agree," like too many others in- 
tended to form the infant mind, is very far 
from being true. On the contrary, the most 
peaceful relation of the different species to 
each other is that of armed neutrality. They 



24 MY GAEDEN^ ACQUAINTANCE. 

are very jealous of neighbors. A few years 
ago, I was much interested in the house- 
building of a pair of summer yellow-birds. 
They had chosen a very pretty site near the 
top of a tall white lilac, within easy eye-shot 
of a chamber window. A very pleasant thing 
it was to see their little home growing with 
mutual help, to watch their industrious skill 
interrupted only by little flirts and snatches 
of endearment, frugally cut short by the 
common-sense of the tiny housewife. They 
had brought their work nearly to an end, 
and had already begun to line it with fern- 
down, the gathering of which demanded 
more distant journeys and longer absences. 
But, alas ! the syringa, immemorial manor 
of the catbirds, was not more than twenty 
feet away, and these " giddy neighbors " had, 
as it appeared, been all along jealously watch- 
ful, though silent, witnesses of what they 
deemed an intrusion of squatters. No sooner 
were the pretty mates fairly gone for a new 



*' To their unguarded nest these weasel Scots 
Came stealing." 



MY GARDEN ACqUAINTANCE. 25 

Silently they flew back and forth, each giv- 
ing a vengeful dab at the nest in passing. 
They did not fall-to and deliberately de- 
stroy it, for they might have been caught- 
at their mischief. As it was, whenever the 
yellow-birds came back, their enemies were 
bidden in their own sight-proof bush. Sev- 
eral times their unconscious victims repaired 
damages, but at length, after counsel taken 
together, they gave it up. Perhaps, like 
other unlettered folk, they came to the con- 
clusion that the Devil was in it, and yielded 
to the invisible persecutions of witchcraft. 

The robins, by constant attacks and an- 
noyances, have succeeded in driving off the 
blue-jays who used to build in our pines, 
their gay colors and quaint noisy ways mak- 
ing them welcome and amusing neighbors. 
I once had the chance of doing a kindness 
to a household of them, which they received 
with very friendly condescension. I had had 
my eye for some time upon a nest, and was 
puzzled by a constant fluttering of what 
seemed full-grown wings in it whenever I 
drew nigh. At last I climbed the tree, in 



26 MY GAEDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 

spite of angry protests from the old birds 
against my intrusion. The mystery had a 
very simple solution. In building the nest, 
a long piece of packthread had been some- 
what loosely woven in. Three of the young 
had contrived to entangle themselves in it, 
and had become full-grown without being 
able to launch themselves upon the air. 
One was unharmed ; another had so tightly 
twisted the cord about its shank that one 
foot w^as curled up and seemed paralyzed ; 
the third, in its struggles to escape, had 
sawn through the flesh of the thigh and so 
much harmed itself that I thought it hu- 
mane to put an end to its misery. When I 
took out my knife to cut their hempen bonds, 
the heads of the family seemed to divine 
my friendly intent. Suddenly ceasing their 
cries and threats, they perched quietly with- 
in reach of my hand, and watched me in my 
w^ork of manumission. This, owing to the 
fluttering terror of the prisoners, was an 
affair of some delicacy ; but erelong I was 
rewarded by seeing one of them fly away to 
a neighboring tree, while the cripple, nj^king 



MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 27 

a paracliute of his wings, came lightly to the 
ground, and hopped off as well as he could, 
with one leg, obsequiously waited on by his 
elders. A week later I had the satisfaction 
of meeting him in the pine-walk, in good 
spirits, and already so far recovered as to 
be able to balance himself with the lame 
foot. I have no doubt that in his old age 
he accounted for his lameness by some hand- 
some story of a wound received at the fa- 
mous Battle of the Pines, when our tribe, 
overcome by numbers, was driven from its 
ancient camping-ground. Of late years the 
jays have visited us only at intervals ; and 
in winter their bright plumage, set off by 
the snow, and their cheerful cry, are espe- 
cially welcome. They would have furnished 
^sop with a fable, for the feathered crest in 
which they seem to take so much satisfac- 
tion is often their fatal snare. Country boys 
make a hole with their finger in the snow- 
crust just large enough to admit the jay's 
head, and, hollowing it out somewhat be- 
neath, bait it with a few kernels of corn. 
The crest slips easily into the trap, but re- 



28 MY GAUDEN ACqUAINTANCE. 

fuses to be pulled out again, and he who 
came to feast remains a jjrey. 

Twice have the crow-blackbirds attempted 
a settlement in my pines, and twice have the 
robins, who claim a right of pre-emption, so 
successfully played the part of border-ruf- 
fians as to drive them away, — to my great 
regret, for they are the best substitute we 
have for rooks. At Shady Hill (now, alas ! 
empty of its so long-loved household) they 
build by hundreds, and nothing can be more 
cheery than their creaking clatter (like a 
convention of old-fashioned tavern-signs) as 
they gather at evening to debate in mass 
meeting their windy politics, or to gossip 
at their tent-doors over the events of the 
day. Their port is grave, and their stalk 
across the turf as martial as that of a second- 
rate ghost in Hamlet. They never meddled 
with my corn, so far as I could discover. 

For a few years I had crows, but their 
nests are an irresistible bait for boys, and 
their settlement was broken up. They grew 
so wonted as to throw off a great part of 
their shyness, and to tolerate my near ap- 



MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 29 

proach. One very hot clay T stood for some 
time within twenty feet of a mother and 
three children, who sat on an elm hough 
over my head, gasping in the sultry air, and 
holding their wings half-spread for coolness. 
All birds during the pairing season become 
more or less sentimental, and murmur soft 
nothings in a tone very unlike the grinding- 
organ repetition and loudness of their ha- 
bitual song. The crow is very comical as a 
lover, and to hear him trying to soften his 
croak to the proper Saint Preux standard, 
has something the effect of a Mississippi 
boatman quoting Tennyson. Yet there are 
few things to my ear more melodious than 
his caw of a clear winter morning as it drops 
to you filtered through five hundred fathoms 
of crisp blue air. The hostility of all smaller 
birds makes the moral character of the crow, 
for all his deaconlike demeanor and garb, 
somewhat questionable. He could never 
sally forth without insult. The golden rob- 
ins, especially, would chase him as far as I 
could follow with ray eye, making him duck 
clumsily to avoid their importunate bills. I 



30 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 

do not believe, however, that he robbed any 
nests hereabouts, for the refuse of the gas- 
works, which, in our free-and-easy commu- 
nity, is allowed to poison the river, supplied 
him with dead alewives in abundance. I 
used to watch him making his periodical 
visits to the salt-marshes and coming back 
with a fish in his beak to his young savages, 
who, no doubt, like it in that condition 
which makes it savory to the Kanakas and 
other corvine races of men. 

Orioles are in great plenty with me. I 
have seen seven males flashing about the 
garden at once. A merry crew of them 
swing their hammocks from the pendulous 
boughs. During one of these latter years, 
when the canker-worms stripped our elms 
as bare as winter, these birds went to the 
trouble of rebuilding their unroofed nests, 
and chose for the purpose trees which are 
safe from those swarming vandals, such as 
the ash and the button-wood. One year a 
pair (disturbed, I suppose, elsewhere) built 
a second nest in an elm, within a few yards 
of the house. My friend, Edward E. Hale, 



MY GARDEN ACqUAINTANCE. 31 

told me once that the oriole rejected from 
his web all strands of brilliant color, and I 
thought it a striking example of that in- 
stinct of concealment noticeable in many 
birds, though it should seem in this instance 
that the nest was amply protected by its 
position from all marauders but owls and 
squirrels. Last year, however, I had the 
fullest proof that Mr. Hale was mistaken. 
A pair of orioles built on the lowest trailer 
of a weeping elm, which hung within ten 
feet of our drawing-room window, and so 
low that I could reach it from the ground. 
The nest was wholly woven and felted with 
ravellings of woollen carpet in which scarlet 
predominated. Would the same thing have 
happened in the woods 1 Or did the near- 
ness of a human dwelling perhaps give the 
birds a greater feeling of security ? They 
are very bold, by the way, in quest of cord- 
age, and I have often watched them strip- 
ping the fibrous bark from a honeysuckle 
growing over the very door. But, indeed, 
all my birds look upon me as if I were a 
mere tenant at will, and they were land- 



32 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 

lords. With shame I confess it, I have been 
bullied even by a humming-bird. This 
spring, as I was cleansing a pear-tree of its 
lichens, one of these little zigzagging blurs 
came purring toward me, couching his long 
bill like a lance, his throat sparkling with 
angry fire, to warn me off from a Missouri- 
currant whose honey he was sipping. And 
many a time he has driven me out of a 
flower-bed. This summer, by the way, a 
pair of these winged emeralds fastened their 
mossy acorn-cup upon a bough of the same 
elm which the orioles had enlivened the 
year before. We watched all their proceed- 
ings from the window through an opera- 
glass, and saw their two nestlings grow from 
black needles with a tuft of down at the 
lower end, till they whirled away on their 
first short experimental flights. They be- 
came strong of wing in a surprisingly short 
time, and I never saw them or the male bird 
after, though the female was regular as usual 
in her visits to our petunias and verbenas. 
I do not think it ground enough for a gen- 
eralization, but in the many times when I 



MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 33 

watched the old birds feeding their young, 
the mother always alighted, while the father 
as uniformly remained upon the wing. 

The bobolinks are generally chance visit- 
ors, tinkling through the garden in blos- 
soming-time, but this year, owing to the 
long rains early in the season, their favorite 
meadows were flooded, and they were driven 
to the upland. So I had a pair of them 
domiciled in my grass-field. The male used 
to perch in an apple-tree, then in full bloom, 
and, while I stood perfectly still close by, 
he would circle away, quivering round the 
entire field of five acres, with no break in 
his song, and settle down again among the 
blossoms, to be hurried away almost imme- 
diately 1 )y a new rapture of music. He had th e 
volubility of an Italian charlatan at a fair, 
and, like him, appeared to be proclaiming the 
merits of some r|uack remedy. Opodeldoc- 
opodeldoc - trij -Doctor -Lincohi' s -opodeldoc ! he 
seemed to repeat over and over again, with 
a rapidity that would have distanced the 
deftest-tongued Figaro that ever rattled. I 
remember Count Gurowski saying once, 



34 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 

with, that easy superiority of knowledge 
about this country which is the monopoly 
of foreigners, that we had no singing-birds ! 
"Well, well, Mr. Hepworth Dixon has found 
the typical America in Oneida and Salt 
Lake City. Of course, an intelligent Euro- 
pean is the best judge of these matters. 
The truth is there are more singing-birds 
in Europe because there are fewer forests. 
These songsters love the neighborhood of 
man because hawks and owls are rarer, 
while their own food is more abundant. 
Most people seem to think, the more trees, 
the more birds. Even Chateaubriand, who 
first tried the primitive-forest-cure, and 
whose description of the wilderness in its 
imaginative effects is unmatched, fancies the 
"people of the air singing their hymns to 
him." So far as my own observation goes, 
the farther one penetrates the sombre soli- 
tudes of the woods, the more seldom does 
he hear the voice of any singing-bird. In 
spite of Chateaubriand's minuteness of de- 
tail, in spite of that marvellous reverbera- 
tion of the decrepit tree falling of its own 



MY GAEDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 05 

weight, which he was the first to notice, I 
cannot help doubting whether he made his 
way very deep into the wilderness. At any 
rate, in a letter to Fontanes, written in 1804, 
he speaks of mes chevaux iiaissant d quelque 
distmue. To be sure Chateaubriand was 
apt to mount the high horse, and this may 
have been but an afterthought of the grand 
seigneur, but certainly one would not make 
much headway on horseback toward the 
druid fastnesses of the primeval pine. 

The bobolinks build in considerable num- 
bers in a meadow within a quarter of a mile 
of us. A houseless lane passes through the 
midst of their camp, and in clear westerly 
weather, at the right season, one may hear a 
score of them singing at once. When they 
are breeding, if I chance to pass, one of the 
male birds always accompanies me like a 
constable, flitting from post to post of the 
rail-fence, with a short note of reproof con- 
tinually repeated, till I am fairly out of the 
neighborhood. Then he will swing away 
into the air and run down the wind, gurg- 
ling music without stint over the unheeding 



36 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 

tussocks of meadow-grass and dark clumps 
of bulrushes that mark his domain. 

We have no bird whose song will match 
the nightingale's in compass, none whose 
note is so rich as that of the European 
blackbird ; but for mere rapture I have 
never heard the bobolink's rival. But his 
opera-season is a short one. The ground 
and tree sparrows are our most constant 
performers. It is now late in August, and 
one of the latter sings every day and all day 
long in the garden. Till within a fortnight, 
a pair of indigo-birds would keep up their 
lively duo for an hour together. While I 
write, I hear an oriole gay as in June, and 
the plaintive may-he of the goldfinch tells 
me he is stealing my lettuce-seeds. I know 
not what the experience of others may have 
been, but the only bird I have ever heard 
sing in the night has been the chip-bird. I 
should say he sang about as often during the 
darkness as cocks crow. One can hardly 
help fancying that he sings in his dreams. 

" Father of light, what sunnie seed. 
What glance of day hast thou confined 



MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 37 

Into this bird ? To all the breed 
This busie ray thou hast assigned ; 
Their magnetism works all night, 
And dreams of Paradise and light." 

On second thought, I remember to have 
heard the cuckoo strike the hours nearly all 
night with the regularity of a Swiss clock. 

The dead limbs of our elms, which I spare 
to that end, bring us the flicker every sum- 
mer, and almost daily I hear his wild scream 
and laugh close at hand, himself invisible. 
He is a shy bird, but a few days ago I had 
the satisfaction of studying him through the 
blinds as he sat on a tree within a few feet 
of me. Seen so near and at rest, he makes 
good his claim to the title of pigeon- wood- 
pecker. Lumberers have a notion that he 
is harmful to timber, digging little holes 
through the bark to encourage the settle- 
ment of insects. The regular rings of such 
perforations which one may see in almost 
any apple-orchard seem to give some proba- 
bility to this theory. Almost every season 
a solitary quail visits us, and, unseen among 
the currant-bushes, calls Bob White, Bob 



38 MY GAEDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 

White, aa if he were playing at hide-and- 
seek with that imaginary being. A rarer 
visitant is the turtle-dove, whose pleasant 
coo (something like the muffled crow of 
a cock from a coop covered with snow) I 
have sometimes heard, and whom I once 
had the good luck to see close by me in the 
mulberry-tree. The wild-pigeon, once nu- 
merous, I have not seen for many years.* 
Of savage birds, a hen-hawk now and then 
quarters himself upon us for a few days, 
sitting sluggish in a tree after a surfeit of 
poultry. One of them once offered me a 
near shot from my study- window one drizzly 
day for several hours. But it was Sunday, 
and I gave him the benefit of its gracious 
truce of God. 

Certain birds have disappeared from our 
neighborhood within my memory. I re- 
member when the whippoorwill could be 
heard in Sweet Auburn. The night-hawk, 
once common, is noAv rare. The brown 
thrush has moved farther up country. For 

* They made their appearance again this sum- 
mer (1870). 



MY GArtDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 39 

years I have not seen or heard any of the 
larger owls, whose hootmg was one of my 
boyish terrors. The cliff-swallow, strange 
emigrant, that eastward takes his way, has 
come and gone again in my time. The 
Lank-swallows, wellnigh innumerable during 
my boyhood, no longer frequent the crumbly 
cliff of the gravel-pit by the river. The 
barn-swallows, which once swarmed in our 
barn, flashing through the dusty sun-streaks 
of the mow, have been gone these many 
years. My father would lead me out to see 
them gather on the roof, and take counsel 
before their yearly migration, as Mr. White 
used to see them at Selborne. Eheu,fugaces I 
Thank fortune, the swift still glues his nest, 
and rolls his distant thunders night and day 
in the wide-throated chimneys, still sprinkles 
the evening air with his merry twittering. 
The populous heronry in Fresh Pond mead- 
ows has been wellnigh broken up, but still 
a pair or two haunt the old home, as the 
gypsies of EUangowan their ruined huts, 
and every evening fly over us riverwards, 
clearing their throats with a hoarse hawk 



40 MY GAEDEN ACqUAINTANCE. 

as they go, and, in cloudy weather, scjirce 
higher than the tops of the chimneys. Some- 
times I have known one to alight in one of 
our trees, though for what purpose I never 
could divine. Kingfishers have sometimes 
puzzled me in the same way, perched at 
high noon in a pine, springing their watch- 
man's rattle when they flitted away from my 
curiosity, and seeming to shove their top- 
heavy heads along as a man does a wheel- 
barrow. 

Some birds have left us, I suppose, because 
the country is growing less wild. I once 
found a summer duck's nest within quarter 
of a mile of our house, but such a trouvaille 
would be impossible now as Kidd's treasure. 
And yet the mere taming of the neighbor- 
hood does not quite satisfy me as an expla- 
nation. Twenty years ago, on my way to 
bathe in the river, I saw every day a brace 
of woodcock, on the miry edge of a spring 
within a few rods of a house, and constantly 
visited by thirsty cows. There was no growth 
of any kind to conceal them, and yet these 
ordinarily shy birds were almost as indiffer- 



MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE, 41 

ent to my passing as common poultry would 
have been. Since bird-nesting has become 
scientific, and dignified itself as oology, that, 
no doubt, is partly to blame for some of our 
losses. But some old friends are constant. 
Wilson's thrush comes every year to remind 
me of that most poetic of ornithologists. He 
flits before me through the pine-walk like 
the very genius of solitude. A pair of pe- 
wees have built immemorially on a jutting 
brick in the arched entrance to the ice-house. 
Always on the same brick, and never more 
than a single pair, though two broods of five 
each are raised there every summer. How 
do they settle their claim to the homestead ? 
By what right of primogeniture ] Once the 
children of a man employed about the place 
oologized the nest, and the pewees left us for 
a year or two. I felt towards those boys as 
the messmates of the Ancient Mariner did 
towards him after he had shot the albatross. 
But the pewees came back at last, and one 
of them is now on his wonted perch, so near 
my window that 1 can hear the click of his 
bill as he snaps a fly on the wing with 



4i-Z MY GARDEN ACQUAINTAI^CE. 

the unerring precision a stately Trasteverina 
shows in the capture of her smaller deer. 
The pewee is the first bird to pipe up in the 
morning ; and during the early summer he 
preludes his matutinal ejaculation of peivee 
with a slender whistle, unheard at any other 
time. He saddens with the season, and, as 
summer declines, he changes his note to eheu, 
pewee ! as if in lamentation. Had he been 
an Italian bird, Ovid would have had a 
plaintive tale to tell about him. He is so 
familiar as often to pursue a fly through the 
open window into my library. 

There is something inexpressibly dear to 
me in these old friendships of a lifetime. 
There is scarce a tree of mine but has had, 
at some time or other, a happy homestead 
among its boughs, to w^hich I cannot say, 

*' Many light hearts and wings, 
Wliich now be dead^ lodged in thy living bowers." 

My walk under the pines would lose half 
its summer charm were I to miss that shy 
anchorite, the Wilson's thrush, nor hear in 
haying-time the metallic ring of his song, 



MY GARDEN ACqUAINTANCE. 43 

that justifies his rustic name of scythe-whet. 
I protect my game as jealously as an English 
squire. If anybody had oologized a certain 
cuckoo's nest I know of (I have a pair in 
my garden every year), it would have left 
me a sore place in my mind for weeks. I 
love to bring these aborigines back to the 
mansuetude they showed to the early voy- 
agers, and before (forgive the involuntary 
pun) they had grown accustomed to man 
and knew his savage ways. And they repay 
your kindness with a sweet familiarity too 
delicate ever to breed contempt. I have 
made a Penn-treaty with them, preferring 
that to the Puritan way with the natives, 
which converted them to a little Hebraism 
and a great deal of Medford rum. If they 
will not come near enough to me (as most 
of them will), I bring them close with an 
opera-glass, — a much better weapon than a 
gun. I would not, if I could, convert them 
from their pretty pagan ways. The only one 
I sometimes have savage doubts about is the 
red squirrel. I think he oologizes. I know 
he eats cherries (we counted five of them at 



44 MY GARDEN ACQUAINTANCE. 

one time in a single tree, the stones pattering 
down like the sparse hail that preludes a 
storm), and that he gnaws off the small end 
of pears to get at the seeds. He steals the 
corn from under the noses of my poultry. 
But what would you have ? He will come 
down upon the limb of the tree I am lying 
under till he is within a yard of me. He 
and his mate will scurry up and down the 
great black-walnut for my diversion, chat- 
tering like monkeys. Can I sign his death- 
warrant who has tolerated me about his 
grounds so long? Not I. Let them steal, 
and welcome. I am sure I should, had I 
had the same bringing up and the same 
temptation. As for the birds, I do not be- 
lieve there is one of them but does more good 
than harm ; and of how many featherless 
bipeds can this be said ? 




A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 




lEN scarcely know how beautiful fire 
^■*^ ' is," says Shelley ; and I am apt to 
think there are a good many other 
things concerning which their knowledge 
might be largely increased without becom- 
ing burdensome. Nor are they altogether 
reluctant to be taught, — not so reluctant, 
perhaps, as unable, — and education is sure 
to find one fulcrum ready to her hand by 
which to get a purchase on them. For most 
of us, I have noticed, are not without an 
amiable willingness to assist at any spectacle 
or entertainment (loosely so called) for which 
no fee is charged at the door. If special 
tickets are sent us, another element of pleas- 
ure is added in a sense of privilege and pre- 



46 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 

eminence (pitiably scarce in a democracy) so 
deeply rooted in human nature that I have 
seen people take a strange satisfaction in 
being near of kin to the mute chief person- 
age in a funeral. It gave them a moment's 
advantage over the rest of us whose grief 
was rated at a lower place in the procession. 
But the words "admission free" at the 
bottom of a handbill, though holding out no 
bait of inequality, have yet a singular charm 
for many minds, especially in the country. 
There is something touching in the con- 
stancy with which men attend free lectures, 
and in the honest patience with which they 
listen to them. He who pays may yawn or 
shift testily in his seat, or even go out with 
an awful reverberation of criticism, for he has 
bought the right to do any or all of these 
and paid for it. But gratuitous hearers are 
anaesthetized to suffering by a sense of virtue. 
They are performing perhaps the noblest, 
as it is one of the most difficult, of human 
functions in getting Something (no matter 
how small) for Nothing. They are not pes- 
tered by the awful duty of securing their. 



A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 47 

money's worth. They are wasting time, to 
do which elegantly and without lassitude is 
the highest achievement of civilization. If 
they are cheated, it is, at worst, only of a 
superfluous hour which was rotting on their 
hands. Not only is mere amusement made 
more piquant, but instruction more palata- 
ble, by this imiversally relished sauce of 
gratuity. And if the philosophic observer 
finds an object of agreeable contemplation 
in the audience, as they listen to a discourse 
on the probability of making missionaries 
go down better with the Feejee-Islanders by 
balancing the hymn-book in one pocket 
with a bottle of Worcestershire in the other, 
or to a plea for arming the female gorilla 
with the ballot, he also takes a friendly in- 
terest in the lecturer, and admires the wise 
economy of Nature who thus contrives an 
ample field of honest labor for her bores. 
Even when the insidious hat is passed round 
after one of these eleemosynary feasts, the 
relish is but heightened by a conscientious 
refusal to disturb the satisfaction's complete- 
ness with the rattle of a single contributory 



48 A GOOD WORD FOE, WINTER. 

penny. So firmly persuaded am I of this 
gratis-in&tinct in our common humanity, 
that I believe I could fill a house by adver- 
tising a free lecture on Tupper considered as 
a philosophic poet, or on my personal recol- 
lections of the late James K. Polk. This 
being so, I have sometimes wondered that 
the peep-shows which Nature provides with 
such endless variety for her children, and 
to which we are admitted on the bare condi- 
tion of having eyes, should be so generally 
neglected. To be sure, eyes are not so com- 
mon as people think, or poets would be 
plentier, and perhaps also these exhibitions 
of hers are cheapened in estimation by the 
fact that in enjoying them we are not get- 
ting the better of anybody else. Your true 
lovers of nature, however, contrive to get even 
this solace ; and Wordsworth looking upon 
mountains as his own peculiar sweethearts, 
was jealous of anybody else who ventured 
upon even the most innocent flirtation with 
them. As if such fellows, indeed, could pre- 
tend to that nicer sense of what-d'ye-call-it 
which was so remarkable in him! Marry 



A GOOD WOED FOR WINTER. 49 

come up ! Mountains, no doubt, may in- 
spire a profounder and more exclusive passion, 
but on the whole I am not sorry to have 
been born and bred among more domestic 
scenes, where I can be hospitable without a 
pang. I am going to ask you presently to 
take potluck with me at a board where AVin- 
ter shall supply whatever there is of cheer. 

I think the old fellow has hitherto had 
scant justice done him in the main. We 
make him the symbol of old age or death, 
and think we have settled the matter. As if 
old age were never kindly as well as frosty ; 
as if it had no reverend graces of its own as 
good in their way as the noisy impertinence of 
childhood, the elbowing self-conceit of youth, 
or the pompous mediocrity of middle life ! 
As if there were anything discreditable in 
death, or nobody had ever longed for it ! Sup- 
pose we grant that Winter is the sleep of the 
year, what then ? I take it upon me to say 
that his dreams are finer than the best reality 
of his waking rivals. 

" Sleep, Silence' child, the father of soft Rest," 



50 A GOOD WOED FOR WINTER. 

is a very agreeable acquaintance, and most 
of us are better employed in his company 
than anywhere else. For my own part, I 
think Winter a pretty wide-awake old boy, 
and his bluff sincerity and hearty ways are 
more congenial to my mood, and more whole- 
some for me, than any charms of which his 
rivals are capable. Spring is a fickle mis- 
tress, who either does not know her own 
mind, or is so long in making it up, whether 
you shall have her or not have her, that 
one gets tired at last of her pretty miffs and 
reconciliations. You go to her to be cheered 
up a bit, and ten to one catch her in the 
sulks, expecting you to find enough good- 
humor for both. After she has become 
Mrs. Summer she grows a little more staid 
in her demeanor ; and her abundant table, 
where you are sure to get the earliest fruits 
and vegetables of the season, is a good foun- 
dation for steady friendship ; but she has 
lost that delicious aroma of maidenhood, and 
w^hat was delicately rounded grace in the 
girl gives more than hints of something like 
redundance in the matron. Autumn is the 



A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 51 

poet of the family. He gets you up a splen- 
dor that you would say was made out of real 
sunset ; but it is nothing more than a few 
hectic leaves, when all is done. He is but a 
sentimentalist, after all ; a kind of Lamar- 
tine whining along the ancestral avenues he 
has made bare timber of, and begging a 
contribution of good-spirits from your own 
savings to keep him in countenance. But 
Winter has his delicate sensibilities too, only 
he does not make them as good as indelicate 
by thrusting them forever in your face. He 
is a better poet than Autumn, when he has 
a mind, but, like a truly great one as he is, 
he brings you down to your bare manhood, 
and bids you understand him out of that, 
with no adventitious helps of association, or 
he will none of you. He does not touch 
those melancholy chords on which Autumn 
is as great a master as Heine. Well, is there 
no such thing as thrumming on them and 
maundering over them till they get out of 
tune, and you wish some manly hand would 
crash through them and leave them dangling 
brokenly forever ? Take Winter as you find 



52 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 

him, and he turns out to be a thoroughly- 
honest fellow, with no nonsense in him, and 
tolerating none in you, which is a great com- 
fort in the long run. He is not what they 
call a genial critic ; but bring a real man 
along with you, and you will find there is a 
crabbed generosity about the old cynic that 
you would not exchange for all the creamy 
concessions of Autumn. " Season of mists 
and mellow fruitfulness," quotha ? That 's 
just it ; Winter soon blows your head clear 
of fog and makes you see things as they are ; 
I thank him for it ! The truth is, between 
ourselves, I have a very good opinion of the 
whole family, who always welcome me with- 
out making me feel as if I were too much of 
a poor relation. There ought to be some 
kind of distance, never so little, you know, 
to give the true relish. They are as good 
company, the worst of them, as any I know, 
and I am not a little flattered by a conde- 
scension from any one of them ; but I hap- 
pen to hold Winter's retainer, this time, and, 
like an honest advocate, am bound to make 
as good a showing as I can for him, even if 



A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 53 

it cost a few slurs upon the rest of the 
household. Moreover, Winter is coming, 
and one would like to get on the blind side 
of him. 

The love of Nature in and for herself, or 
as a mirror for the moods of the mind, is a 
modern thing. The fleeing to her as an es- 
cape from man was brought into fashion by- 
Rousseau ; for his prototype Petrarch, though 
he had a taste for pretty scenery, had a true 
antique horror for the grander aspects of na- 
ture. He got once to the top of Mont Ven- 
toux, but it is very plain that he did not 
enjoy it. Indeed, it is only within a century 
or so that the search after the picturesque 
has been a safe employment. It is not so 
even now in Greece or Southern Italy. Where 
the Anglo-Saxon carves his cold fowl, and 
leaves the relics of his picnic, the ancient or 
mediaeval man might be pretty confident 
that some rufiian would try the edge of his 
knife on a chicken of the Platonic sort, and 
leave more precious bones as an offering to 
the genius of the place. The ancients were 
certainly more social than we, though that. 



54 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 

perhaps, was natural enough, when a good 
part of the world was still covered with for- 
est. They huddled together in cities as well 
for safety as to keep their minds warm. The 
Romans had a fondness for country life, but 
they had fine roads, and Rome was always 
within easy reach. The author of the Book 
of Job is the earliest I know of who showed 
any profound sense of the moral meaning of 
the outward world ; and I think none has 
approached him since, though Wordsworth 
conies nearest with the first two books of the 
" Prelude." But their feeling is not precisely 
of the kind I speak of as modern, and which 
gave rise to what is called descriptive poe- 
try. Chaucer opens his Clerk's Tale with a 
bit of landscape admirable for its large style, 
and as well composed as any Claude. 

" There is right at the west end of Itaille, 
Down at the root of Vesulus the cold, 
A lusty plain abundant of vitaille, 
Where many a tower and town thou mayst be- 
hold, 
That founded were in time of fathers old, 
And many an other delectable sight ; 
And Saluces this noble country hight." 



A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 55 

What an airy precision of touch there is 
here, and what a sure eye for the points of 
character in landscape ! But the picture is 
altogether subsidiary. No doubt the works of 
Salvator Rosa and Gaspar Poussin show that 
there must have been some amateur taste for 
the grand and terrible in scenery ; but the 
British poet Thomson (" sweet-souled " is 
Wordsworth's apt word) was the first to do 
with words what they had done partially 
with colors. He was turgid, no good nie- 
trist, and his English is like a translation 
from one of those poets who wrote in Latin 
after it was dead ; but he was a man of sin- 
cere genius, and not only English, but Euro- 
pean literature is largely in his debt. He 
was the inventor of cheap amusement for the 
million, to be had of All-out-doors for the 
asking. It was his impulse which uncon- 
sciously gave direction to Rousseau, and it is 
to the school of Jean Jacques that we owe 
St. Pierre, Cowper, Chateaubriand, Words- 
worth, Byron, Lamartine, George Sand, Rus- 
kin, — the great painters of ideal landscape. 

So loncc as men had slender means, wheth- 



56 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 

er of keeping out cold or checkmating it 
with artificial heat, Winter was an unwel- 
come guest, especially in the country. There 
he w^as the bearer of a lettre de cachet, which 
shut its victims in solitary confinement with 
few resources but to boose round the fire and 
repeat ghost-stories, which had lost all their 
freshness and none of their terror. To go to 
bed was to lie awake of cold, with an added 
shudder of fright whenever a loose casement 
or a waving curtain chose to give you the 
goose-flesh. Bussy Rabutin, in one of his 
letters, gives us a notion how uncomfort- 
able it was in the country, with green wood, 
smoky chimneys, and doors and windows that 
thought it was their duty to make the wind 
whistle, not to keep it out. With fuel so 
dear, it could not have been much better 
in the city, to judge by Menage's warning 
against the danger of our dressing-gowns tak- 
ing fire, while we cuddle too closely over the 
sparing blaze. The poet of Winter himself 
is said to have written in bed, with his hand 
through a hole in the blanket ; and we may 
suspect that it was the warmth quite as 



A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 57 

much as the company that first drew men 
together at the coffee-house. Coleridge, in 
January, 1800, writes to Wedgewood : " I 

am sitting by a fire in a rug great-coat 

It is most barbarously cold, and you, I fear, 
can shield yourself from it only by perpetual 
imprisonment." This thermometrical view 
of winter is, I grant, a depressing one ; for 
I think there is nothing so demoralizing as 
cold. I know of a boy who, when his father, 
a bitter economist, was brought home dead, 
said only, " Now we can burn as much wood 
as we like." I would not off-hand prophesy 
the gallows for that boy. I remember with 
a shudder a pinch I got from the cold once 
in a railroad-car. A born fanatic of fresh 
air, I found myself glad to see the windows 
hermetically sealed by the freezing vapor 
of our breath, and plotted the assassination 
of the conductor every time he opened the 
door. I felt myself sensibly barbarizing, 
and would have shared Colonel Jack's bed 
in the ash-hole of the glass-furnace with a 
grateful heart. Since then I have had more 
charity for the prevailing ill-opinion of win- 



58 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 

ter. It was natural enough that Ovid should 
measure the years of his exile in Pontus by 
the number of winters. 

Ut sumus in Ponto, ter frigore constitit Ister, 
Facta est Euxini dura ter unda maris : 

Thrice hath the cohl bound Ister fast, since I 
In Pontus was, thrice Euxuie's wave made hard. 

Jubinal has printed an Anglo-Norman piece 
of doggerel in which Winter and Summer 
dispute which is the better man. It is not 
without a kind of rough and inchoate humor, 
and I like it because old Whiteboard gets 
tolerably fair play. The jolly old fellow 
boasts of his rate of living, with that con- 
tempt of poverty which is the weak spot in 
the burly English nature. 

Ja Dieu ne place que me avyenge 
Que ne face plus honour 
Et plus despenz en un soul jour 
Que vus en tote vostre vie : 

Now God forbid it hap to me 
That I make not more great display, 
And spend more in a single day 
Than you can do in all your life. 



A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 59 

The best touch, perhaps, is Winter's claim 
for credit as a mender of the highways, 
which was not without point w^hen every 
road in Europe was a quagmire during a 
good part of the year unless it was bottomed 
on some remains of Roman engineering. 

Je su, fet-il, seigntjr et mestre 

Et a bon droit le dey estre, 

Quant de la bowe face cauce 

Par un petit de geele f '.'^••^' '-^'A ^ .-; " 



•^ r^ 






Master and lord I am, says'^, 
And of good riglit so ouglit to be. 
Since I make causeys, safely crost. 
Of mud, with just a pinch of frost. // 

But there is no recognition of Winter as the 
best of outdoor company. 

Even Emerson, an open-air man, and a 
bringer of it, if ever any, confesses, 

*' The frost-king ties my fumbling feet, 
Sings in my ear, my hands are stones, 
Curdles the blood to the marble bones. 
Tugs at the heartstrings, numbs the sense, 
And herns in life with narrowing fence." 



60 A GOOD WOED FOR WINTER. 

Winter was literally "the inverted year," 
as Thomson called him ; for such entertain- 
ments as could be had must be got within 
doors. What cheerfulness there was in bru- 
mal verse was that of Horace's dissolve frigus 
ligna super foco large reponenSj so pleasantly 
associated with the cleverest scene in Koder- 
ick Random. This is the tone of that poem 
of Walton's friend Cotton, which won the 
praise of Wordsworth : — 

" Let us home. 
Our mortal enemy is come ; 
Winter and all his blustering train 
Have made a voyage o'er the main. 

" Fly, fly, the foe advances fast ; 
Into our fortress let us haste. 
Where all the roarers of the north 
Can neither storm nor starve us forth. 

" There underground a magazine 
Of sovereign juice is cellared in, 
Liquor that will the siege maintain 
Should Phoebus ne'er return again. 

" Whilst we together jovial sit 
Careless, and crowned with mirth and wit. 



A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 61 

Where, though bleak winds confine us home, 
Our fancies round the world shall roam," 

Thomson's view of Winter is also, on the 
whole, a hostile one, though he does justice 
tx) his grandeur. 

"Thus Winter falls, 
A heavy gloom oppressive o'er the world, 
Through Nature shedding influence malign." 

He finds his consolations, like Cotton, in the 
house, though more refined : — 

" While without 
The ceaseless winds blow ice, be my retreat 
Between the groaning forest and the shore 
Beat by the boundless multitude of waves, * 

A rural, sheltered, solitary scene, 
Where ruddy fire and beaming tapers join 
To cheer the gloom. There studious let me sit 
And hold high converse with the mighty dead." 

Doctor Akenside, a man to be spoken of with 
respect, follows Thomson. With him, too, 
"Winter desolates the year," and 

*' How pleasing wears the wintry night 
Spent with the old illustrious dead ! 
While by the taper's trembling light 



6'Z A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 

T seem those awful scenes to tread 
Where chiefs or legislators lie/' &c. 

Akenside had evidently been reading 
Thomson. He had the conceptions of a 
great poet with less faculty than many a 
little one, and is one of those versifiers of 
whom it is enough to say that we are always 
willing to break him off in the middle with 
an &c., well knowing that what follows is 
but the coming -round again of w^hat went 
before, marching in a circle with the cheap 
numerosity of a stage-army. In truth, it 
is no wonder that the short days of that 
cloudy northern climate should have added 
\o winter a gloom borrowed of the mind. 
We hardly know, till we have experienced 
the contrast, how sensibly our winter is alle- 
viated by the longer daylight and the pel- 
lucid atmosphere. I once spent a winter in 
Dresden, a southern climate compared with 
England, and really almost lost my respect 
for the sun when I saw him groping among 
the chimney-pots opposite my windows as 
he described his impoverished arc in the 
sky. The enforced seclusion of the season 



A GOOD WORD FOE, WINTER. 63 

makes it the time for serious study and oc- 
cupations that demand fixed incomes of un- 
broken time. This is why Milton said " that 
his vein never happily flowed but from the 
autumnal equinox to the vernal/' though in 
his twentieth year he had written, on the re- 



Fallor ? an et nobis redeunt in carmina vires 
Ingeniumque mihi munere veris adest ? 

Err I ? or do the powers of song return 
To me, and genius too, the gifts of Spring ? 

Goethe, so far as I remember, was the first 
to notice the cheerfulness of snow in sun- 
shine. His Harz-reise im Winter gives no 
hint of it, for that is a diluted reminiscence 
of Greek tragic choruses and the Book of 
Job in nearly equal parts. In one of the 
singularly interesting and characteristic let- 
ters to Frau von Stein, however, written 
during the journey, he says : " It is beauti- 
ful indeed ; the mist heaps itself together in 
light snow-clouds, the sun looks through, 
and the snow over everything gives back a 



64 A GOOD WOUD FOU WINTER. 

feeling of gayety." But I find in Cowper 
tlie first recognition of a general amiability 
in Winter. The gentleness of his temper, 
and the wide charity of his sympathies, made 
it natural for him to find good in everything 
except the human heart. A dreadful creed 
distilled from the darkest moments of dys- 
peptic solitaries compelled him against his 
will to see in that the one evil thing made 
hy a God whose goodness is over all his 
works. Cowper's two walks in the morn- 
ing and noon of a winter's day are delight- 
ful, so long as he contrives to let himself be 
happy in the graciousness of the landscape. 
Your muscles grow springy, and your lungs 
dilate with the crisp air as you walk along 
with him. You laugh with him at the gro- 
tesque shadow of your legs lengthened across 
the snow by the just-risen sun. I know 
nothing that gives a purer feeling of out- 
door exhilaration than the easy verses of this 
escaped hypochondriac. But Cowper also 
preferred his sheltered garden- walk to those 
robuster joys, and bitterly acknowledged the 
depressing influence of the darkened year. 



A GOOD WOED FOR WINTER. G5 

In December, 1780, lie writes: "At this 
season of the year, and in this gloomy un- 
comfortable climate, it is no easy matter for 
the owner of a mind like mine to divert it 
from sad subjects, and to fix it upon such 
as may administer to its amusement." Or 
was it because he was writing to the dread- 
ful Newton ? Perhaps his poetry bears truer 
witness to his habitual feeling, for it is only 
there that poets disenthral themselves of their 
reserve and become fully possessed of their 
greatest charm, — the power of being franker 
than other men. In the Third Book of the 
Task he boldly afiirms his preference of the 
country to the city even in winter : — 

"But are not wholesome airs, thoiigh unperfximed 
By roses, and clear suns, thougli scarcely felt. 
And groves, if inharmonious, yet secure 
From clamor, and whose very silence charms. 
To be preferred to smoke ? . . . . 
They would be, were not madness in the head 
And folly in the heart ; were England now 
What England was, j)lain, hospitable kind. 
And undebauched." 

The conclusion shows, however, that he 
was thinking mainly of fireside delights, not 



66 A GOOD WORD TOR WINTER. 

of the blusterous companionsliip of nature. 
This appears even more clearly in the 
Fourth Book : — 

"0 Winter, ruler of the inverted year"; 

Lut I cannot help interrupting him to say 
how pleasant it always is to track poets 
through the gardens of their predecessors 
and find out their likings by a flower 
snapped off here and there to garnish their 
own nosegays. Cowper had been reading 
Thomson, and "the inverted year" pleased 
his fancy with its suggestion of that starry 
wheel of the zodiac moving round through 
its spaces infinite. He could not help lov- 
ing a handy Latinism (especially with elision . 
beauty added), any more than Gray, any 
more than Wordsworth, — on the sly. But 
the :piember for Olney has the floor : ^ — 

*'0 Winter, ruler of the inverted year, 
Thy scattered hair with sleet like ashes filled, 
Thy breath congealed upon thy lips, thy cheeks 
Fringed with a beard made white with other snows 
Than those of age, thy forehead wrapt in clouds, 
A leafless branch thy sceptre, and thy throne 
,A sliding car, indebted to no wheels, 



A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 67 

-But iirged by storms along its slippery way, 
I love thee all unlovely as thou seem'st, 
And dreaded as thou art ! Thou hold'st the sun 
A prisoner in the yet undawning east, 
Shortening his journey between morn and noon, 
And hurrying him, impatient of his stay, 
Down to the rosy west, but kindly still 
: Compensating his loss with added hours 
, Of social converse and instructive ease, 
And gathering at short notice, in oue group. 
The family dispersed, and fixing thought. 
Not less dispersed by daylight and its cares. 
I crown thee king of intimate delights, 
Fireside enjoyments, homebom happiness, 
And all the comforts that the lowly roof 
Of undisturbed Retirement, and the hours 
Of long uninterrupted evening know." 

I call this a good human bit of writing, 
imaginative, too, — not so flushed, not so 
.... highfaluting (let me dare the odious 
word ! ) as the modern style since poets have 
got hold of a theory that imagination is 
common-sense turned inside out, and not 
common-sense sublimed, — but wholesome, 
masculine, and strong in the simplicity of a 
mind wholly occupied with its theme. To 



68 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 

me Cowper is still the best of our descrip- 
tive poets for every-day wear. And what 
unobtrusive skill he has ! How he height- 
ens, for example, your sense of winter-even- 
ing seclusion, by the twanging horn of the 
postman on the bridge ! That horn has 
rung in my ears ever since I first heard it, 
during the consulate of the second Adams. 
Wordsworth strikes a deeper note ; but does 
it not sometimes come over one (just the 
least in the world) that one would give any- 
thing for a bit of nature pure and simple, 
without quite so strong a flavor of W. W. ? 
W. W. is, of course, sublime and all that — 
but ! For my part, I will make a clean 
breast of it, and confess that I can't look at 
a mountain without fancying the late laure- 
ate's gigantic Roman nose thrust between 
me and it, and thinking of Dean Swift's 
profane version of Romanos rerum dominos 
into Roman nose ! a rare U7i I dom your nose I 
But do I judge verses, then, by the impres- 
sion made on me by the man who wrote 
them? Not so fast, my good friend, but, 
for good or evil, the character and its intel- 
lectual product are inextricably interfused. 



A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 69 

If I remember aright, Wordsworth hun- 
self (except in his magnificent skating-scene 
in the " Prelude " ) has not much to say for 
winter out of doors. I cannot recall any 
picture by him of a snow-storm. The 
reason may possibly be that in the Lake 
Country even the winter storms bring rain 
rather than snow. He was thankful for the 
Christmas visits of Crabb Eobinson, because 
they "helped him through the winter." 
His only hearty praise of winter is when, as 
General Feviier, he defeats the French : — 

"Htunanity, delighting to behold 
A fond reflection of her own decay, 
Hath painted Winter like a traveller old, 
Propped on a staff, and, through the sullen day. 
In hooded mantle, limping o'er the plain 
As though his weakness were disturbed by pain : 
Or, if a juster fancy should allow 
An undisputed symbol of command. 
The chosen sceptre is a withered bough 
Infirmly grasped within a Avithered hand. 
These emblems suit the helpless and forlorn ; 
But mighty Winter the device shall scorn." 

The Scottish poet Grahame, in his " Sab- 
bath," says manfully : — 



70 A GOOD WOED FOR WINTER. 

''Now is the time 
To visit Nature in her grand attire " ; 

and lie has one little picture whicli no other 
poet has surpassed : — 

''High-ridged the whirled drift has almost reached 
The powdered keystone of the churchyard porch : 
Mute hangs the hooded bell; the tombs lie buried." 

Even in our own climate, where the sun 
shows his winter face as long and as brightly 
as in Central Italy, the seduction of the 
chimney-corner is apt to predominate in the 
mind over the severer satisfactions of muf- 
fled fields and penitential woods. The very 
title of Whittier's delightful " Snow-Bound" 
shows what he was thinking of, though he 
does vapor a little about digging out paths. 
The verses of Emerson, perfect as a Greek 
fragment (despite the archaism of a dissyl- 
labic fire), which he has chosen for his epi- 
graph, tell us, too, how the 

"Housemates sit 
Around the radiant fireplace^ enclosed ' 
In a tumultuous^ privacy of storm." 



A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 71 

They are all in a tale. It is always the 
iristis Hiems of Virgil. Catch one of them 
having a kind word for old Barbe Fleurie, 
unless he whines through some cranny, like 
a beggar, to heighten their enjoyment while 
they toast their slippered toes. I grant 
there is a keen relish of contrast about 
the bickering flame as it gives an emphasis 
beyond Gherardo della Notte to loved faces, 
or kindles the gloomy gold of volumes 
scarce less friendly, especially when a tem- 
pest is blundering round the house. Words- 
worth has a fine touch that brings home to 
us the comfortable contrast of without and 
within, during a storm at night, and the 
passage is highly cliaracteristic of a poet 
whose inspiration always has an undertone 
of bourgeois: — 

" How touching, when, at midnight, sweep 
Snow-muffled winds, and all is dark, 
To hear, — and sink again to sleep ! " 

J. H., one of those choice poets who will 
not tarnish their bright fancies by publica- 
tion, always insists on a sno w-stoim as essen- 



72 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 

tial to the true atmosphere of whist. Mrs. 
Battles, in her famous rule for the game, im- 
plies winter, and would doubtless have added 
tempest, if it could he had for the asking. For 
a good solid read also, into the small hours, 
there is nothing like that sense of safety 
against having your evening laid waste, 
which Euroclydon brings, as he bellows 
down the chimney, making your fire gasp, 
or rustles snow-flakes against the pane with 
a sound more soothing than silence. Emer- 
son, as he is apt to do, not only hit the nail 
on the head, but drove it home, in that last 
phrase of the " tumultuous privacy." 

But I would exchange this, and give some- 
thing to boot, for the privilege of walking 
out into the vast blur of a north-northeast 
snow-storm, and getting a strong draught on 
the furnace within, by drawing the first fur- 
rows through its sandy drifts. I love those 

" Noontide twilights which snow makes 
With tempest of the blinding flakes." 

If the wind veer too much toward the east, 
you get the heavy snow that gives a true 



A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 73 

Alpine slope to the boughs of your ever- 
greens, and traces a skeleton of your elms in 
white ; but you must have plenty of north 
in your gale if you want those driving nettles 
of frost that sting the cheeks to a crimson 
manlier than that of fire. During the great 
storm of two winters ago, the most robustious 
periwig-pated fellow of late years, I waded 
and floundered a couple of miles through the 
whispering night, and brought home that 
feeling of expansion we have after being in 
good company. " Great things doeth He 
which we cannot comprehend ; for he saith 
to the snow, ' Be thou on the earth.' " 

There is admirable snow scenery in Judd's 
" Margaret," but some one has confiscated 
my copy of that admirable book, and, per- 
haps. Homer's picture of a snow-storm is the 
best yet in its large simplicity : — 

" And as in winter-time, when Jove his cold sharp 

javelins throws 
Amongst \is mortals, and is moved to white the 

earth with snows, 
The winds asleep, he freely pours till highest 

prominents, 



74 <A GOOD WORD POR WINTER. 

• Hill -tops, low meadows, and the fields that crown 
with most contents 
The toils of men, seaports and shores, are hid, 

and every place, 
But floods, that fair snow's tender flakes, as their 
own brood, embrace." 

Chapman, after all, though he makes very- 
free with him, comes nearer Homer than 
anybody else. There is nothing in the origi- 
nal of that fair snow's tender flakes, but 
neither Pope nor Cowper could get out of 
their heads the Psalmist's tender phrase, 
" He giveth his snow like wool," for which 
also Homer affords no hint. Pope talks of 
" dissolving fleeces," and CowqDer of a " fleecy 
mantle." But David is nobly simple, while 
Pope is simply nonsensical, and Cowper 
pretty. If they must have prettiness. Mar- 
tial would have supplied them with it in his 

Densum tacitarum vellus aquarum, 

which is too pretty, though I fear it would 
;have pleased Dr. Donne. Eustathius of 
Thessalonica calls snow v8cop eplcodes, woolly 
water, which a poor old French poet, Godeau, 
has amplified into this : — - 



A GOOD WORD FOE, WINTER. 75 

Lorsque la froidure iiihumaine 
De leur verd ornement depouille les forets 
Sous line neige epaisse il coiivre les guerets, 
Et la ueige a pour eux la chaleur de la laine. 

In. this, as in Pope's version of the passage in. 
Homer, there is, at least, a sort of suggestion 
of snow-storm in the blinding drift of words. 
But, on the whole, if one would know what 
snow is, I should advise him not to hunt up 
what the poets have said about it, but to look 
at the sweet miracle itself. 

The preludings of Winter are as beautiful 
as those of Spring. In a gray December 
day, when, as the farmers say, it is too cold 
to snow, his numbed fingers will let fall 
doubtfully a few star-shaped flakes, the snow- 
drops and anemones that harbinger his more 
assured reign. Now, and now only, may be 
seen, heaped on the horizon's eastern edge, 
those "blue clouds" from forth which 
Shakespeare says that Mars " doth pluck the 
masoned turrets." Sometimes also, when 
the sun is low, you will see a single cloud 
trailing a flurry of snow along the south- 
ern hills in a wavering fringe of purple. 



76 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 

And when at last the real snow-storm comes, 
it leaves the earth with a virginal look on 
it that no other of the seasons can rival, — 
compared with which, indeed, they seem 
soiled and vulgar. 

And what is there in nature so beautiful 
as the next morning after such confusion of 
the elements ? Night has no silence like 
this of busy daj^ All the batteries of noise 
ai'e spiked. We see the movement of life as 
a deaf man sees it, a mere wraith of the 
clamorous existence that inflicts itself on our 
ears when the ground is bare. The earth is 
clothed in innocence as a garment. Every 
wound of the landscape is healed ; whatever 
was stiff has been sweetly rounded as the 
breasts of Aphrodite ; what was unsightly 
has been covered gently with a soft splendor, 
as if, Cowley would have said. Nature had 
cleverly let fall her handkerchief to hide it. 
If the Virgin (Notre Dame de la neige) were 
to come back, here is an earth that would 
not bruise her foot nor stain it. It is 

" The fanned snow 
That 's bolted by the northern blasts twice o'er,"^ 



A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 77 

Snffiata e stretta dai venti Schiavi, 

Winnowed and packed by the Sclavonian winds, — 



packed so hard sometimes on hill-slopes that 
it will bear your weight. What grace is in 
all the curves, as if every one of them had 
been swept by that inspired thumb of Phid- 
ias's journeyman ! 

Poets have fancied the footprints of the 
wind in those light ripples that sometimes 
scurry across smooth water with a sudden 
blur. But on this gleaming hush the aerial 
deluge has left plain marks of its course ; 
and in gullies through which it rushed tor- 
rent-like, the eye finds its bed irregularly 
scooped like that of a brook in hard beach- 
sand, or, in more sheltered spots, traced with 
outlines like those left by the sliding edges 
of the surf upon the shore. The air, after 
all, is only an infinitely thinner kind of 
jvater, such as I suppose we shall have to 
drink when the state does her w^hole duty as 
a moral reformer. Nor is the wind the only 
thing whose trail you will notice on this 
sensitive surface. You will find that you 



78 A GOOD WORD FOE WINTEE. 

have more neighbors and night visitors than 
you dreamed of. Here is the dainty foot- 
print of a cat ; here a dog has looked in on 
yon like an amateur watchman to see if all is 
right, slumping clumsily about in the mealy 
treachery. And look ! before you were up 
in the morning, though you were a punctual 
courtier at the sun's levee, here has been a 
squirrel zigzagging to and fro like a hound 
gathering the scent, and some tiny bird 
searching for unimaginable food, — perhaps 
for the tinier creature, whatever it is, that 
drew this slender continuous trail like those 
made on the wet beach by light borderers of 
the sea. The earliest autographs were as 
frail as these. Poseidon traced his lines, or 
giant birds made their mark, on preadamite 
sea-margins ; and the thunder-gust left the 
tear-stains of its sudden passion there; nay,; 
we have the signatures of delicatest fern- 
leaves on the soft ooze of aeons that dozed 
away their dreamless leisure before conscious- 
ness came upon the earth with man. Some 
whim of nature locked them fast in stone 
for us after-thoughts of creation. Which of 



A GOOD WORD FOU WINTER. 79 

US shall leave a footprint as imperishable as 
that of the ornithorhyncus, or much more 
so than that of these Bedouins of the snow- 
desert? Perhaps it was only because the 
ripple and the rain-drop and the bird were 
not thinking of themselves, that they had 
such luck. The chances of immortality de- 
pend very much on that. How often have, 
we not seen poor mortals, dupes of a season's 
notoriety, carving their names on seeming- 
solid rock of merest beabh-sand, whose feeble 
hold on memory shall be washed away by 
the next wave of fickle opinion ! Well, well, 
honest Jacques, there are better things to be 
found in the snow than sermons. 

The snow that falls damp comes commonly 
in larger flakes from windless skies, and is> 
the prettiest of all to watch from under cover. 
This is the kind Homer had in mind ; and 
Dante, who had never read him, compares 
the dilatate falde, the flaring flakes, of his 
fiery rain, to those of snow among the moun- 
tains without wind. This sort of snowfall 
has no fight in it, and does not challenge you. 
to a wrestle like .that which drives well from- 



80 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 

the northward, with all moisture thoroughly 
winnowed out of it by the frosty wind. 
Burns, who was more out of doors than most 
poets, and whose barefoot Muse got the color 
in her cheeks by vigorous exercise in all 
weathers, was thinking of this drier deluge, 
when he speaks of the " whirling drift,*' and 

tells how 

" Chanticleer 
Shook off the powthery snaw." 

But the damper and more deliberate falls 
have a choice knack at draping the trees ; 
and about eaves or stone-walls, wherever, 
indeed, the evaporation is rapid, and it finds 
a chance to cling, it will build itself out in 
curves of wonderful beauty. I have seen 
one of these dumb waves, thus caught in the 
act of breaking, curl four feet beyond the 
edge of my roof and hang there for days, as 
if Nature were too well pleased with her 
work to let it crumble from its exquisite 
pause. After such a storm, if you are lucky 
enough to have even a sluggish ditch for 
a neighbor, be sure to pay it a visit. You 
will find its banks corniced with what seems 



A GOOD WORD EOR WINTER. 81 

precipitated light, and the dark current 
down below gleams as if with an inward 
lustre. Dull of motion as it is, you never 
saw water that seemed alive before. It has 
a brightness, like that of the eyes of some 
smaller animals, which gives assurance of 
life, but of a life foreign and unintelligible. 

A damp snow-storm often turns to rain, 
and, in our freakish climate, the wind will 
whisk sometimes into the northwest so sud- 
denly as to plate all the trees with crystal 
before it has swept the sky clear of its last 
cobweb of cloud. Ambrose Philips, in a 
poetical epistle from Copenhagen to the Earl 
of Dorset, describes this strange confectionery 
of Nature, — for such, I am half ashamed to 
say, it always seems to me, recalling the 
" glorified sugar-candy " of Lamb's first night 
at the theatre. It has an artificial air, alto- 
gether beneath the grand artist of the atmos- 
phere, and besides does too much mischief to 
the trees for a philodendrist to take unmixed 
pleasure in it. Perhaps it deserves a poet 
like Philips, who really loved Nature and 
yet liked her to be mighty fine, as Pepys 



82 A GOOD WORD FOU WINTER. 

would say, with a heightening of powder and 
rouge : — 

" And yet but lately have 1 seen e'en here 

The winter in a lovely dress appear. 

Ere yet the clouds let fall the treasured snow. 

Or winds begun through hazy skies to blow, 

At evening a keen eastern breeze arose, 

And the descending rain unsullied froze. 

Soon as the silent shades of night withdrew, 

The ruddy noon disclosed at once to view 

The face of Nature in a rich disguise, 

And brightened every object to my eyes ; 

For every shrub, and every blade of grass, 

And every pointed thorn, seemed wrought in glass ; 

In pearls and rubies ilch the hawthorns show, 

And through the ice the crimson berries glow ; 

The thick-sprung reeds, which watery marshes yield. 

Seem polished lances in a hostile field ; 

The stag in limpid currents with surprise 

Sees crystal branches on his forehead rise ; 

The spreading oak, the beech, the towering pine. 

Glazed over in the freezing ether shine ; 

The frighted birds the rattling branches shun, 

Which wave and glitter in the distant sun. 

When, if a sudden gust of wind arise, 

The brittle forest into atoms flies. 

The crackling wood beneath the tempest bends 

And in a spangled shower the prospect ends." 



A GOOD WOUD rOH WINTER. 83 

It is not uninstructive to see how tolerable 
Ambrose is, so long as he sticks manfully 
to what he really saw. The moment he 
undertakes to improve on Nature he sinks 
into the mere court poet, and we surrender 
him to the jealousy of Pope without a sigh. 
His "rattling branches " and " crackling for- 
est " are good, as truth always is after a fash- 
ion ; but what shall we say of that dreadful 
stag w^hich, there is little doubt, he valued 
above all the rest, because it was purely his 
own ? 

The damper snow tempts the amateur 
architect and sculptor. His Pentelicus has 
been brought to his very door, and if there 
are boys to be had (whose company beats all 
other recipes for prolonging life) a middle- 
aged Master of the Works will knock the 
years off his account and make the family 
Bible seem a dealer in foolish fables, by a 
few hours given heartily to this business. 
First comes the Sisyphean toil of rolling the 
clammy balls till they refuse to budge far- 
ther. Then, if you would play the statuary, 
they are piled one upon the other to the 



84 A GOOD WORD POE WINTER. 

proper height ; or if your aim be masonry, 
whether of house or fort, they must be 
squared and beaten solid with the shovel. 
The material is capable of very pretty effects, 
and your young companions meanwhile are 
unconsciously learning lessons in aesthetics. 
From the feeling of satisfaction with which 
one squats on the damp floor of his extem- 
porized dwelling, I have been led to think 
that the backwoodsman must get a sweeter 
savor of self-reliance from the house his own 
hands have built than Bramante or Sanso- 
vino could ever give. Perhaps the fort is 
the best thing, for it calls out more mascu- 
line qualities and adds the cheer of battle 
with that dumb artillery which gives pain 
enough to test pluck without risk of serious 
hurt. Already, as I write, it is twenty-odd 
years ago. The balls fly thick and fast. 
The uncle defends the waist-high ramparts 
against a storm of nephews, his breast plas- 
tered with decorations like another Kadet- 
sky's. How well I recall the indomitable 
good-humor under fire of him who fell in 
the front at Ball's Bluff, the silent perti- 



A GOOD WORD FOE WINTER 85 

nacity of the gentle scliolar who got his last 
hurt at Fair Oaks, the ardor in the charge of 
the gallant gentleman who, with the death- 
wound in his side, headed his brigade at 
Cedar Creek ! How it all comes back, and 
they never come ! I cannot again be the 
Vauban of fortresses in the innocent snow, 
but I shall never see children moulding their 
clumsy giants in it without longing to help. 
It was a pretty fancy of the young Vermont 
sculptor to make his first essay in this eva- 
nescent material. Was it a figure of Youth, I 
wonder ? Would it not be well if all artists 
could begin in stuff as perishable, to melt 
away when the sun of prosperity began to 
shine, and leave nothing behind but the gain 
of practised hands ? It is pleasant to fancy 
that Shakespeare served his apprenticeship at 
this trade, and owed to it that most pathetic 
of despairing wishes, — 

"0, that I were a mockery-king of snow. 
Standing before tlie sun of Bolingbroke, 
To melt myself away in water-drops !" 

I have spoken of the exquisite curves of 
snow surfaces. Not less rare are the tints of 



Qb A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 

whicli they are capable, — the faint blue of 
the hollows, for the shadows in snow are 
always blue, and the tender rose of higher 
points, as you stand with your back to the 
setting sun and look upward across the soft 
rondure of a hillside. I have seen within a 
mile of home effects of color as lovely as 
any iridescence of the Silberhorn after sun- 
down. Charles II., who never said a foolish 
thing, gave the English climate the highest 
praise when he said that it allowed you more 
hours out of doors than any other, and I 
think our winter may fairly make the same 
boast as compared with the rest of the year. 
Its still mornings, with the thermometer 
near zero, put a premium on walking. There 
is more sentiment in turf, perhaps, and it is 
more elastic to the foot ; its silence, too, is 
wellnigh as congenial with meditation as that 
of fallen pine-tassel ; but for exhilaration 
there is nothing like a stiff snow-crust that 
creaks like a cricket at every step, and com- 
municates its own sparkle to the senses. 
The air you drink is frajp'pe, all its grosser 
particles precipitated, and the dregs of your 



A GOOD WORD FOB, WINTER. 87 

blood with them. A purer current mounts 
to the brain, courses sparkling through it, 
and rinses it thoroughly of all dejected stuff. 
There is nothing left to breed an exhalation 
of ill-humor or despondency. They say that 
this rarefied atmosphere has lessened the 
capacity of our lungs. Be it so. Quart-pots 
are for muddier liquor than nectar. To me, 
the city in winter is infinitely dreary, — the 
sharp street-corners have such a chill in them, 
and the snow so soon loses its maidenhood 
to become a mere drab, — " doing shameful 
things," as Steele says of politicians, " with- 
out being ashamed." I pine for the Quaker 
purity of my country landscape. I am 
speaking, of course, of those winters that 
are not niggardly of snow, as ours too often 
are, giving us a gravelly dust instead. Noth- 
ing can be unsightlier than those piebald 
fields where the coarse brown hide of Earth 
shows through the holes of her ragged 
ermine. But even when there is abundance 
of snow, I find as I grow older that there 
are not so many good crusts as there used to 
be. When I first observed this, I rashly set 



88 A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 

it to the account of that general degeneracy 
in nature ( keeping pace with the same mel- 
ancholy phenomenon in man) which forces 
itself upon the attention and into the philos- 
ophy of middle life. But happening once to 
be weighed, it occurred to me that an arch 
which would bear fifty pounds could hardly 
be blamed for giving way under more than 
three times the weight. I have sometimes 
thought that if theologians would remember 
this in their arguments, and consider that the 
man may slump through, with no fault of 
his own, where the boy would have skimmed 
the surface in safety, it would be better for 
all parties. However, when you do get a 
crust that will bear, and know any brooklet 
that runs down a hillside, be sure to go and 
take a look at him, especially if your crust is 
due, as it commonly is, to a cold snap follow- 
ing eagerly on a thaw. You will never find 
him so cheerful. As he shrank away after 
the last thaw, he built for himself the most 
exquisite caverns of ice to run through, if 
not "measureless to man" like those of 
Alph, the sacred river, yet perhaps more 



A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 89 

pleasing for their narrowness than those for 
their grandeur. What a cunning silversmith 
is Frost ! The rarest workmanship of Delhi 
or Genoa copies him but clumsily, as if the 
fingers of all other artists were thumbs. 
Fernwork and lacework and filigree in end- 
less variety, and under it all the water tin- 
kles like a distant guitar, or drums like a 
tambourine, or gurgles like the Tokay of an 
anchorite's dream. Beyond doubt there is a 
fairy procession marching along those frail 
arcades and translucent corridors. 

*' Their oaten pipes blow wondrous shrill. 
The hemlock small blow clear." 

And hark! is that the ringing of Titania's 
bridle, or the bells of the wee, wee hawk 
that sits on Oberon's wrist? This wonder 
of Frost's handiwork may be had every win- 
ter, but he can do better than this, though 
I have seen it but once in my life. There 
had been a thaw without wind or rain, mak- 
ing the air fat with gray vapor. Towards 
sundown came that chill, the avant-courier 
of a northwesterly gale. Then, though there 



90 A GOOD WORD TOE WINTER, 

was no perceptible current in the atmos- 
phere, the fog began to attach itself in frosty- 
roots and filaments to the southern side of 
every twig and grass-stem. The very posts 
had poems traced upon them by this dumb 
minstrel. Wherever the moist seeds found 
lodgment grew an inch-deep moss fine as 
cobweb, a slender coral-reef, argentine, deli- 
cate, as of some silent sea in the moon, such 
as Agassiz dredges when he dreams. The 
frost, too, can wield a delicate graver, and 
in fancy leaves Piranesi far behind. He. 
covers your window-pane with Alpine etch- 
ings, as if in memory of that sanctuary where 
he finds shelter even in midsummer. 

Now look down from your hillside across 
the valley. The trees are leafless, but this 
is the season to study their anatomy, and did 
you ever notice before how much color there 
is in the twigs of many of them ? And the 
smoke from those chimneys is so blue it 
seems like a feeder of the sky into which it 
flows. Winter refines it and gives it agree- 
able associations. In summer it suggests 
cookery or the drudgery of steam-engines, 



A GOOD WORD FOE, WINTER. 91 

but now your fancy (if it can forget for 
a moment the dreary usurpation of stoves) 
traces it down to the fireside and the bright- 
ened faces of children. Thoreau is the only 
poet who has fitly sung it. The wood-cutter 
rises before day and 

" First in the dusky dawn he sends abroad 
His early scout, his emissarj'^, smoke, 
The earhest, latest pilgrim from his roof. 
To feel the frosty air ; . . . . 
And, while he crouches still beside the hearth. 
Nor musters courage to unbar the door, 
It has gone down the glen with the light wind 
And o'er the plain unfurled its venturous wreath, 
Draped the tree-tops, loitered upon the hill, 
And warmed the pinions of the early bird ; 
And now, perchance, high in the crispy air. 
Has caught sight of the day o'er the earth's edge, 
And greets its master's eye at his low door 
As some refulgent cloud in the upper sk5%" 

Here is very bad verse and very good 
imagination. He had been reading Words- 
worth, or he would not have made tree-tops 
an iambus. In the Moretum of Virgil (or, 
if not his, better than most of his) is a pretty 
picture of a peasant kindling his winter- 
morninsr fire. He rises before dawn. 



V'Z A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 

Sollicitaqiie manu tenebras explorat inertes 
Vestigatque focum Isesus quern deniqne sensit. 
Parvulus exusto remanebat stipite funius, 
Et cinis obductae celabat lumina priinae. 
Admovet his pronam submissa fronte lucernam, 
Et producit acu stiipas humore carentes, 
Excitat et crebris languentem flatibus ignem ; 
Tandem concepto tenebrse fulgore receduut, 
Oppositaque manu lumen defendit ab aura. 

With cautious hand he gropes the sluggish dark. 
Tracking the hearth which, scorched, he feels erelong. 
In burnt-out logs a slender smoke remained. 
And raked-up ashes hid the cinders' eyes ; 
Stooping, to these the lamp outstretched he nears. 
And, with a needle loosening the dry wick, 
With frequent breath excites the languid flame. 
Before the gathering glow the shades recede. 
And his bent hand the new-caught light defends. 

Ovid heightens the picture by a single 
touch : — 

Ipse genu poito flammas exsuscitat aura. 
Kneeling, his breath calls back to life the flames. 

If you walk down now into the woods, 
you may find a robin or a bluebird among 
the red-cedars, or a nuthatch scaling devi- 



A GOOD WOUD FOR WINTER. 93 

oiisly the trunk of some hardwood tree with 
an eye as keen as that of a French soldier 
foraging for the pot-au-feu of his mess. 
Perhaps a "blue-jay shrills cah call in his 
corvine trebles, or a chickadee 

''Shows feats of his gymnastic play, 
Head downward, clinging to the spray." 

But both him and the snow-bird I love 
better to see, tiny fluffs of feathered life, as 
they scurry about in a driving mist of snow, 
than in this serene air. 

Coleridge has put into verse one of the 
most beautiful phenomena of a winter 
walk : — 

*'The woodman winding westward np the glen 
At wintry dawn, where o'er the sheep-track's maze 
The viewless snow-mist weaves a glistening haze, 
Sees full before him, gliding withoiit tread, 
An image with a halo round its head. " 

But this aureole is not peculiar to winter. 
I have noticed it often in a summer morn- 
ing, when the grass was heavy with dew, 
and even later in the day, when the dewless 



94 A GOOD WORD TOE, WINTEE. 

grass was still fresh enougli to liave a gleam 
of its own. 

For my own part I prefer a winter walk 
that take in the nightfall and the intense 
silence that erelong follows it. The evening 
lamps look yellower by contrast with the 
snow, and give the windows that hearty 
look of which our secretive fires have almost 
robbed them. The stars seem 

**To hang, like twinkling winter lamps, 
Among the branches of the leafless trees," 

or, if yon are on a hill-top (whence it is 
sweet to watch the home-lights gleam out 
one by one), they look nearer than in 
summer, and appear to take a conscious part 
in the cold. Especially in one of those 
stand-stills of the air that forebode a change 
of weather, the sky is dusted with motes of 
fire of which the summer-watcher nevey 
dreamed. Winter, too, is, on the whole, the 
triumphant season of the moon, a moon 
devoid of sentiment, if you choose, but 
with the refreshment of a purer intellectual 
light, — the cooler orb of middle life. Who 



A GOOD WORD FOR WINTER. 95 

ever saw anything to match that gleam, 
rather divined than seen, which runs before 
her over the snow, a breath of light, as she 
rises on the infinite silence of winter night ? 
High in the heavens, also she seems to bring 
out some intenser property of cold with her 
chilly polish. The poets have instinctively 
noted this. When Goody Blake imprecates 
a curse of perpetual chill upon Harry Gill, 
she has 

*'The cold, cold moon above her head"; 

and Coleridge speaks of 

" The silent icicles, 
Quietly gleaming to the quiet moon," 

As you walk homeward, — for it is time 
that we should end our ramble, — you may 
perchance hear the most impressive sound 
in nature, unless it be the fall of a tree in 
the forest during the hush of summer noon. 
It is the stifled shriek of the lake yonder 
as the frost throttles it. Wordsworth has 
described it (too much, I fear, in the style 
of Dr. Armstrong) : — 



96 A GOOD WOUD FOR WINTER. 

*'And, interrupting oft that eager game, 
From under Esthwaite's splitting fields of ice, 
The pent-up air, struggling to free itself, 
Gave out to meadow-grounds and hills a loud 
Protracted yelling, like the noise of wolves 
Howling in troops along the Bothnicmain." 

Thorean (unless the English lakes have a 
different dialect from ours) calls it admirably 
well a " whoop." But it is a noise like none 
other, as if Demogorgon were moaning in- 
articulately from under the earth. Let us 
get within doors, lest we hear it again, for 
there is something bodeful and uncanny 
in it. 




Cambridge : Printed by Welch, Bigelow, & Co. 



WORKS OF JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL. 



" Ja^nes Russell Lovjell has produced so much verse of various 
exquisite and exalted beauty since hejirst began to use a musical 
pen, now some thirty-six years ago, that the world is apt to asso- 
ciate his fame exclusively with his poetry ; yet, had he written 
tiothing beyond his four volu-mes of prose, he would have been able 
to comma7id a place tji the front ratik of A77terican men of genius. 
We find iji Lowell's prose such wealth of wit and humor, such 
opjclence of learning, such treasures of wisdom, such splendor of 
imagery, and such sumptuous dictio7t, that, while we revel in vs 
uifflicence, we forget the gifts and fascinations of ail other authors, 
and seem never to have inet so dazzling a combination of bril- 
liancy a7id -versatility before." — Chicago Tribune. 



POEMS. 

First and Second Series. 2 vols. i6mo. With Por- 
trait. § 3.00. 
Blue and Gold Edition. 2 vols. 32mo. Cloth, ^2.50; 

Half Calf, $5.00; Morocco, $7.00. 
Cabinet Edition. 2 vols. i6ino. Cloth, ^ 3.00 ; Half 

Calf, $6.50; Morocco, $9.00. 
Diamond Edition, i vol. i8mo. Cloth, $ i.oo ; Half 

Calf, S3.00; Morocco, $3.75. 
Red-Line Edition. With Portrait and 16 Illustrations. 

Small 4to. Cloth, full gilt, $3.50; Half Calf, $6.00; Morocco, 

$8.00. 

Household Edition. i2mo. $2.00. 

Illustrated Library Edition. 8vo. 32 full-page Il- 
lustrations. $5.00. 



A FABLE FOR CRITICS, i6mo. 75 cents. 

Rapid, vigorous, humorous, poetical sketches of famous Ameri- 
can authors. 

THE VISION OF SIR LAUNFAL. i6mo. 75 cts. 

The Same. Finely Illustrated. Cloth, $3.00; Mo- 
rocco, $5.50. 

The Same. Vest-Pocket Edition. 50 cents. 
An exquisite poetic story, founded on the old legend of the search 
for the Holy Grail. 



UNDER THE WILLOWS, and other Poems 

i6ino. Cloth, S 1-50 ; Half calf, $ 3.50 ; Morocco, $ 4.30. 
" ' Under the Willows' is one of the most admirable bits of idyllic 
work done in our j^eneration." — Saturday Review {.London). 

THE CATHEDRAL. i6mo. $1.25. 

THE COURTIN' : A Yankee Idyl. Illustrated in 

Silhouette. Cloth, $3.00; Morocco, $7.00. j 

THE BIGLOW PAPERS. First and Second Series, i 
2 vols. i6mo. $1.50 each. 

*' Mr. Lowell's fund of the Yankee vernacular is as geimine and 
inexhaustible as his perennial vein of mingled humor and common | 
sense." — Neiu York Tribune. \ 

FIRESIDE TRAVELS. $1.50. 
CONTENTS : Cambridge Thirty Years Ago. — A Moosehead ' 
Journal. — At Sea. — In the Mediterranean. — Italy. — A Few 
Bits of Roman Mosaic. 

AMONG MY BOOKS. First Series. lamo. Cloth, I 

$2.00; Half Calf, § 4.00 ; Morocco, $5.00. 

CONTENTS : Dryden. — Witchcraft. — Shakespeare. — Les- ' 
sing.^- New England Two Centuries Ago. — Rousseau and 
the Sentimentalists. 

MY STUDY WINDOWS. 12.110. Cloth, $2.00; i 
Half Calf, $4.00 ; Morocco, $ 5.00. 

CONTENTS : My Garden Acquaintance. — A Good AV'ord for I 
Winter. — On a Certain Condescension in Foreigners — A 

Great Public Character (Hon Josiah Quincy). — Carlyle. — | 
Abraham Lincoln. — The Life and Letters of James Gates 

Percival. — Thoreau. — Swinburne's Tragedies. — Chaucer. — ' 

Library of Old Authors. — Emerson, the Lecturer. — Pope. | 

AMONG MY BOOKS. Second Series. i2mo. Cloth, j 
$2.00; Half Calf, $4.00 ; Morocco, $ 5.00. | 

CONTENTS; Dante. —Spenser. — Wordsworth. — Milton.— 1 
Keats. J 

THREE MEMORIAL POEMS. $1.25. 



JAMES R. OSGOOD & CO., 

Publishers, Boston. I 



